Page 7

chapter four

Opening the garage on the third day was Meredith’s bright idea, and she coughed at the dust released once they managed to get the sliding door to raise despite the overgrown weeds and brambles.

More stuff piled all the way to the garage door—a freezer, Meredith wondered, considering the white rectangle to the far right of the garage.

“In theory,” she began, “If we gut this out, we could keep the sellable stuff in here while we worked on rehabbing the interior.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Bodie agreed, scratching his chin in his characteristic thinking expression.

“And it even looks like we could take a three-pronged approach. There’s the garage door here, a man door at the back of the garage, and another on the side nearest the fire pit.

Everything comes out, sellable stuff onto the driveway, burnable to the pit, and dumpster into the hauler. ” He nodded, satisfied with the plan.

“Remember being about, oh, I don’t know…twenty or so, and facing off with this kind of project? Just seems to me there were less repercussions back then, if you get me,” Jeremiah admitted, stretching as he looked at the towering stacks of stuff.

“I heard it used to be a carriage house,” said his brother. “Could be more antiques.”

“If we find a body in this house,” Jeremiah said, and Bodie reached for a box.

“Dibs on not being the one to open that freezer,” Bodie called out, heading for the fire.

“Dibs,” called both brothers, so Meredith sighed at their childishness as she began to pick her way through to the freezer.

Luckily for them, it only held one box of entirely melted popsicles and a mystery meat blob long gone green, so Meredith helped Jimothy push the freezer onto the driveway where Jeremiah began to hose it out.

“If it still works, we can sell this for a pretty good amount,” he pointed out, and Meredith nodded.

“I think I see a mower, maybe some other mechanical bits in there too,” she told him.

“Giant wrench things, like they use on semi-trucks or school busses, too. I believe they go for a decent amount as well, but you may want to set those items aside for the local sale rather than trying to auction them off.”

“I think I found my first real antique!” called Bodie, his voice tinged with actual excitement.

Everyone loped over to look inside the box he held, where it looked like a pair of dueling pistols and the accompanying bits were stored in dry rotted velvet casing. “Is it real or some kind of film or play prop?” Meredith asked.

“We’ll have to get an antique guy out here to look at stuff, find out for sure,” Bodie said. “Not my area of expertise.”

“Me either,” admitted Jimothy. “But from a ton of episodes of Antiques Roadshow , I’m going to guess this is worth a decent amount. I found a bunch of bicentennial glass, too. Score!”

“I’ll kill you all!” screamed a voice, just as a man ran at them full speed, brandishing a sword. He wore a uniform—probably Civil War era, if Meredith had to make a guess—but right as they all screamed, he ran through them and vanished.

They breathed heavily for a few minutes, the dueling guns still clenched in Bodie’s hands as if a lifeline. “I’m not going to lie, they do freak me out,” he admitted. “But they can’t do anything to us, can they.”

Jimothy and Jeremiah shared a glance then reached for boxes at the same moment. Meredith noticed, so she asked, “The ghosts here can’t actually do anything to us, right?”

Jimothy sat his box down with a huff, placing one hand dramatically on his hip for emphasis.

“In reality, no! They’re ghosts, so what could they possibly do to live, corporeal creatures.

That said, rumors circulate locally about this house, which is part of the reason it sat abandoned after the last person moved or died or whatever happened to her.

Ghost stories, mostly, the stuff of urban legends that kids tell each other around the fire to try to look cool. ”

Slater zoomed in on his face, and Jimothy swatted at the camera in annoyance. “Too close, man” he muttered, to which Slater simply said sorry, then resumed circling him for his shots.

“Anyway, there are stories about kids who dared other kids to stay the night here and died. There are stories about people who had their car break down and ended up coming to the house for shelter in a storm and died… It’s an old house.

They all have a thousand stories, right? ” Jimothy finished with a shrug.

In the distance, thunder rumbled, the afternoon thunderstorms threatening despite the heat of the day beating down on them. The timing made Meredith shiver, as if it boded ill.

“Sure,” Bodie agreed easily enough. “Tons of old houses have ghost stories or legends built up about their general disarray, and a lot of houses, like Remington Mansion on the west coast, make a lot of tourism bucks off people’s curiosity about the unknown.

That said, how many houses get named a ghost trap?

Neither of you really explained that one to my satisfaction yet. ”

Digging deeper into a box that seemed to mostly be a collection of old roller skates, Meredith glanced up in interest. She would be lying if she pretended the idea of a ghost trap didn’t catch her attention, too, but she never heard of such a thing.

Surely, if they existed, she would’ve heard of them before coming to the competition, right?

“You have to understand,” began Jimothy, his storyteller tone activating again, “That this is all based on local mythology, urban myths, and superstitions from the Appalachian Mountains. They say there are caves here so old, there aren’t even bone remains in them because the caves existed before animals formed bone. ”

Meredith cycled the palm of her hand in a speed-it-up gesture. “Less setup, although I appreciate the theatrics.”

“So anyway, it’s mirrors, really. Supposedly the Menger hotel in San Antonio is a ghost trap, too, and it’s how they set up the mirrors in the house.

They reflect back on each other, causing basically tunnels of nothing that the other side can use to transport themselves back and forth.

” Jimothy shrugged. “I can’t really explain it better than that. ”

“You can’t even see any mirrors in this house,” Meredith pointed out. “We literally haven’t found a single one yet.”

He shrugged again. “You asked me for the story, not for me to explain how the magic worked.”

She shivered again, despite the heat, because of his mention of magic.

So far that day, she never got a moment free of cameras to magic anything away or speed up her work beyond that which she could physically complete.

Although she knew she might have a good shot against the competition without her magic, she would be unstoppable with it, so she needed to start sneaking in more spells.

“I’m going to run to the restroom,” she said to the guys and Slater, who zoomed in on the contents of a box that seemed to be filled with baseball cards.

“Anyone need drinks or anything while I’m in the house?

” They still hadn’t managed to dig their way to the refrigerator, but they had a couple of coolers of drinks stored on the back porch on ice.

“I could use a water,” Bodie replied from deep inside a box to the back of the garage.

“Me, too,” replied Jeremiah, scrubbing sweat off his forehead from by the fireside.

“Nothing for me,” Jimothy said, but his eyes followed her as she headed to the house. If she wasn’t wrong, he suspected something was up with her.

“Not that he would ever guess the truth,” Meredith muttered to Gary, who snaked in between her legs, making it nearly impossible to walk.

“That you’re a witch?” the cat asked, peering up at her. “You know, I’m pretty sure you being a witch isn’t even the weirdest thing in this house. You’re, like, mundane in comparison.”

Meredith snorted, rinsing her face off after she used the facilities and then scrubbing her hands. “You aren’t actually buying into this ghost trap stuff, are you?”

He didn’t answer, so she scrubbed her face with a towel. “Gary! Seriously, are you buying into it?”

But when she dropped the towel to look at him, he wasn’t glancing in her direction.

Instead, his hackles stood on end, his body puffed out to its fullest floof, as he stared in sheer feline terror toward the doorway of the bathroom.

A quick slice of fear spiked down Meredith’s spine, but she forced herself to look, to see what freaked out her usually unflappable familiar.

Water dripped down from her hair, long hair, that hung nearly to her knees.

The white dress she wore seemed almost translucent, but she wore so many layers of fabric, it kind of globbed into a mass of whitish grey.

Her head was down, the hair dropping water onto the floor with loud plops of sound, which drew Meredith’s gaze down to the girl’s bare feet, the toenails blackened, obviously that of a corpse.

When the creature raised its face to gaze at Meredith, she thought it might say something to her. Maybe warn her she could be trapped too or tell her something about the ghost trap in the house. Instead, the creature screamed.

The sound wasn’t like any scream Meredith ever heard before, an ear popping high pitch that physically hurt, making her clutch her head and bend in pain.

It went on and on, too, for what seemed like forever, and when the sound finally stopped, it left a silence so loud, it almost hurt more than the scream.

Its black eyes still focused on Meredith, unblinking and empty, like staring into the void itself. When the creature spoke again, it said simply, “I love adding a witch to my collection.”

Then it vanished.

Meredith clutched her chest, breathing hard, the cat still hissing at her feet. When she finally found words, she asked the cat, “What the fuck was that?”